Fake Miley Cyrus Sex Tape Used to Scam Facebookers (Again)

Below:

Next story in Tech and gadgets

Scammers are preying on Facebook users' combined fascination of
celebrities and sex to lure them to a site that steals their
authentication token in order to gain access to user’s accounts,
post automatic updates to their profiles and tag their friends to
spread the scam.

The bait comes in the form of a nonexistent Miley Cyrus sex tape.
"Miley Cyrus sex tape leaked on the Internet. Millions of men
called in sick after seeing it," reads the banner on a fake,
generic-looking broadcast news still.

This isn’t the first time Cyrus and “sex” have been used to
scam Facebook users. A very similar headline was used to prey on
members of the online community last year.

Clicking the ad leads to a page that appears to host the video
"[Sex Tape] Is Miley's Career Over?" but clicking play brings up
a prompt that asks for a "verification code" to prove that
the viewer is not a minor.

The
URL codes are usually used by developers to obtain permission
for apps to access certain features and information. They’re
often used by mobile app developers to access a phone’s contacts
or location services. They have nothing to do with a user's age.
Once the scammers have temporary access to someone's account,
they can spam friends, steal personal information, impersonate
the account holder and run a script to automatically post
messages to further propagate the scam.

Instead of seeing a purportedly stolen, highly personal tape of
the former Disney Channel star, users are taken on a sad
and boring journey through quiz after quiz that evoke memories of
the spammy hellscape of the early 2000s, before pop-up blockers
came standard on nearly every browser. There is never any payoff,
just a digital mess that the user is left to mop up.